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Journal of e-Media Studies, Volume 7 Issue 1: Early Cinema History (Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections)

Oyallon-Koloski Abstract

This essay demonstrates how multimodal analysis and scholarly collaboration fostered by the Media Ecology Project (MEP) can offer a methodological intervention in the study of performance in early cinema. This research asks what distinguished the performances of Florence Lawrence (known as the “Biograph Girl”) from other performers’ acting modalities during the rise of Hollywood’s star system. To help answer this question, the author created a set of movement annotation guidelines, using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) as an analytical framework, which a team of scholars used to annotate digitized films of Lawrence and her contemporaries from the Library of Congress’ Paper Print Collection. The broad applicability of this system makes this approach to studying actors’ movement applicable to many research questions related to performance styles. This project demonstrates the utility of MEP’s integration with the Mediathread and Semantic Annotation Tool platforms for collaborative data generation, outcome analysis, and dissemination of data to other formats for further visualization. The resulting analysis of Lawrence’s figure movement reveals her to be a versatile actor with an expansive physicality who quickly grasped the economic and aesthetic benefits of generic repeatability.

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